In the same way that your cat is an obligate carnivore and must consume meat to survive, humans are obligate social animals.
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In the same way that your cat is an obligate carnivore and must consume meat to survive, humans are obligate social animals. If we are isolated from each other, we sicken—both mentally and physically—and eventually die. This is why solitary confinement is a form of torture.
Which means that while people have no fixed nature, we are inexorably social animals. The forms our sociality might take are varied, complex, and adaptable, but we can at least confidently say that we are inevitably social. Pro-sociality is baked into (almost) all of us.
Which is why there is no real incompatibility between communist anarchism and individualist anarchism. We are maximally free when we are all free, and we can maximize our individual well-being through voluntary cooperation.
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Since we are obligate social animals, there are limits to what extractive elites can get away with before the entire edifice collapses. Karl Polanyi warned in “The Great Transformation” that people stripped of their community relationships by capitalism, reduced to an abstract commodity called “labor” that is bought and sold in markets, could not survive for long, and that their societies would fall apart.
Just take a look at the US tearing itself apart before our eyes and tell me Polanyi was wrong.
There is, and Bichler and Nitzan put it, an “optimal” level of capitalist sabotage. Exploit too little and you risk being out-competed by rival capitalists; exploit too much and you risk, in essence, eating the seed corn you were supposed to save for next spring’s planting.
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You can look at this situation and conclude that this is somehow our nature—to be greedy, extractive, violent, cruel. But that is both empirically false and deeply reactionary, a condemnation of *other* people as needing to be controlled, or reshaped in your desired image, or culled.
What people need in reality is to be free. Free people do not inevitably make “good” choices. Every one of us has the capacity and instinct to be cruel, violent, and greedy. But we also have the capacity and instinct to care for each other and—most importantly—to be pro-social. We need each other. Self-interest alone can explain why free people tend to make pro-social choices—those of us who want to survive and flourish need each other, regardless of whether we are “good” at heart or not.
